How Trust Shapes Student Perceptions of Evidence in Education for Deliberative Democracies

• In Event: Political Adolescents in the Present: Their Ideas, Discourses, and Contexts of Engagement

Abstract

Numerous reports document the decline of trust – of all types – in the United States. Trust in government is at a near-historic low (Pew Research Center, 2019). Social trust – our faith in other people – also is declining, particularly among young people; a recent study by Uslander (2014) found that only 19% of young adults (ages 18-33) reported that they believe “most people can be trusted.” What are the consequences for declining levels of trust when adolescents are asked to engage in deliberative-democratic educational experiences? Education for deliberative democracies involves teaching students to be actively involved in governing their communities, ensuring that decision making reflects the will of the people (Gutmann & Thompson, 2004; Samuelsson & Bøyum, 2015). Public reasoning – justifying one’s stance to others – is at the heart of this kind of education. Such reasoning requires individuals to interact with evidence and with each other, a process necessarily shaped by levels of trust among participants.

This study examines the extent to which levels of trust shape adolescents’ evidentiary and social perceptions and interactions. Participants (N=90) come from four secondary social studies classes in school sites with racial/ethnic and socioeconomic variability. Data sources include surveys, student interviews, video recordings, and transcripts of six classroom discussions of “open” public issues (Hess, 2009). Prior to the discussions, students read evidence supporting different “sides” of an issue from seven kinds of sources: statistical data, research results, expert judgments, personal experiences, anecdotes or secondhand experiences, examples, and laws or policies. We analyzed the data by looking at patterns and themes within and across the data sources (Miles, Huberman, & Saldaña, 2014).

Findings revealed important links between trust levels and students’ uses of evidence types to validate their issue positions. In particular, participants from one high school, where 75% of students were students of color, expressed substantially higher levels of trust in personal experience as a form of evidence and much lower levels of trust in both statistical data and policy evidence, compared to other whiter, wealthier sites. These results demonstrate that minoritized groups may perceive that dominant narratives (such as those communicated by statistics) do not fully capture their lived experiences, a finding that juxtaposes with research on distinctions between African-Americans’ and European-Americans’ views about history (e.g., Epstein, 1998). Further, we found that social trust is tightly linked to the degree to which students believe that others lie, a result most germane to students’ rationales for trusting (or not trusting) personal, anecdotal, and secondhand experiences and examples as sources of evidence. Our research suggests that explicitly attending to students’ trust levels and the rationales thereof in the political classroom may be a necessary first step towards developing a culture where evidence is examined deeply and education for deliberative democracy can be implemented effectively.

Authors

• Anne-Lise F. Halvorsen, Michigan State University

• Avner Segall, Michigan State University

• Rebecca Jacobsen, Michigan State University

• Margaret S. Crocco, Michigan State University

• Alexandra M Stamm, Michigan State University